In 2019, while working for Jewish Cemeteries of Greater Cincinnati, I did their banner for the annual Sukkos art show at the Mayerson JCC. Visitors gave it the award for “Most Original Material!”
Click on the image to see a larger photo.
Category: Stuff I’ve Done (Page 1 of 2)
We love story time, especially before “we” take a nap on the Sabbath. Here’s a recording of me, reading one of our favorite books.
CHDS Report Cards, circa 2012 (click to view a PDF of all four)
Once upon a time, our children’s day school had volunteer curriculum committees, comprised of teachers and parents. In 2011 or 2012, I was invited to join the General Studies Committee. Among other things, I was tasked with overhauling the school’s report card forms for grades 1-8, both General (secular) and Judaic.
My wife and I had long agonized over the school’s report cards – click on the thumbnails to see them for yourself – especially those for the “Upper Level” Grades. Our biggest gripe was that there was never enough room for teachers’ comments, and once the children were in grades with multiple, specialist teachers, there was barely enough comment room for even the first quarter.
The Committee also found other weaknesses in the forms. Among them:
- The layouts of the different forms, including the locations of the grading scales, were inconsistent.
- There was inadequate reporting of attendance. We knew that some of our children routinely “avoided” individual subjects, but there was no standardized way to report this on the form; even the teachers themselves were potentially in the dark!
- Some subjects and subcategories within subjects weren’t listed on the current forms, and other subjects that were on the forms needed to be removed.
- The names and descriptions of Judaic subjects weren’t always intelligible to the uninitiated, so some parents had trouble making sense of them.
As it turned out, the school was about to implement a change from quarters to trimesters, so we had the perfect excuse to overhaul the report cards. The new forms would:
- Be formatted as consistently as possible, through all eight grades and across all subjects, with easily recognizable labels for grade levels, classes, and subjects.
- Provide space for each teacher, including specialists, to put down grades, attendance information, comments, and signatures, for all classes, for each subject and sub-subject, in each trimester. Ideally, all of each trimester’s information would be grouped together.
- Provide additional space, in which each teacher could report on student behavior. This would be formatted to be consistent with SCORE, a school-wide program that had been implemented the year before. It would also include a check-box with which a teacher could request a meeting with parents.
The iconography was relatively easy. I created large icons, with which to identify a given report card as covering general or Judaic subjects. These were simple, square, black-and-white shapes, which would reproduce nicely on a photocopier.
I also came up with a system for identifying which grade (first through eighth) and which class (boys, girls, or coed) a given report card covered. (Judaic Studies classes at that time were coed for the primary grades, and gender-separated for the older grades; General Studies classes were coed through eighth grade. Later, as the school grew, all grades and classes were separated by gender.)
The icons panel
All of these icons were arranged in the upper right-hand corner of the form.
I also incorporated the school’s branding – logo and logotype – in the design.
The behavioral report took up a lot of space, so it was moved to its own page, the back of the printed report card. Once it had been laid out, it was easy to deploy throughout the school – the checklist was the same for all eight grades, so all I had to do was provide more or fewer columns for each class’ respective number of teachers.
But as I worked on the layout, I struggled with one challenge in particular: Traditional report cards are actually simple tables. They allow you to see an entire year’s grades for a given subject side-by-side, which makes it easy to track progress from term to term. Also, they often stack all of a given term’s grades in a column, which makes it easy to get a quick snapshot of a student’s overall performance in a given term. How could I make ample room for comments and other information without interfering with that kind of basic functionality?
A study in compromise – click to enlarge
In the end, the design reflected compromises between our project’s goals and the need to hold on to the simple functionality of a table, and I had to tailor those compromises to suit the teaching structures of different grades. Take the report card pictured here, for example. Five subjects are taught by one homeroom teacher, who gets one set of attendance and comment fields for each term – and those fields are positioned to the right of the grading areas for the homeroom subjects. Four other subjects are taught by specialist teachers; there’s room for attendance and comments next to each term’s grades. In theory, I could have presented the homeroom subjects’ grades in a traditional, easy-to-follow grid; in fact, doing so would probably have taken up less space. However, I decided it would simplify the form overall if the grades and terms were arranged vertically – consistant with the arrangement of the specialists’ grades.
We rolled out the new report cards in the fall of 2012. Here they are, in four PDF’s.
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This seemed like something other schools could adopt, and I eventually posted my work on Torah Umesorah‘s teacher resource web site. I know of at least one school which has expressed an interest in modifying these report cards for their own use.
Over the course of nineteen years, I produced eleven annual reports for the Cincinnati Community Kollel – annual in the sense that each covered a year’s activities. Over time, they evolved and grew, reflecting different periods in the Kollel’s development. I’ll include all of the reports here, for the amusement of any Kollel alumni and friends who happen to find this page.
The first three reports were very similar, and relatively simple. They were produced in-house (printed and saddle-stitched), on letter-sized paper. Although some of the photos in the PDF’s are in color, these reports were actually printed in black and white. The Kollel made a point of including financial information, provided by a volunteer bookkeeper. (Donors immediately appreciated the organization’s transparency, even if they didn’t know how to interpret financial statements, and they still do.) For these first three reports I didn’t bother prettying the financials up; I just scanned them and pasted the images into the reports. We also included a comprehensive list of everyone who had ever made a contribution; the Kollel made a point of recognizing even relatively small donations, in contrast with the norm among big-city and East Coast organizations – an attitude of which I’m still proud.
Click on an image to view that annual report as a PDF.
After a year’s hiatus, we did two more reports. I refreshed the visuals, and typeset the financials to match the reports’ look and feel. There were also produced in-house.
Click on an image to view that annual report as a PDF.
In 2007, the Kollel expanded into a second building and opened up a satellite location in the northern exurbs. We didn’t put out an annual report until the following spring, but when we did it reflected that expansion, moving from letter-sized (11″) paper to legal (14″). The layout was completely revamped, there were more photos (including some taken by me). We printed the cover, the centerfold, and the financials in color – on the Kollel’s first color laser printer. The following year’s report was done the same way, with the addition of a simulated group photo, featuring then-current staff and local alumni and their families.
A few years went by before we did another report. By then, the Kollel’s northern outpost had closed, but the Kollel had started a community-building project, hiring a part-time community evangelist of sorts. The 2014 report was totally redesigned and much more colorful, although it was still printed and bound in-house. A lot of emphasis was placed on people the Kollel had brought to Cincinnati; that included hiring a photographer to take portraits of the staff and their families. The content was organized into distinctive sections, each with its own visual cues. This was such a large undertaking that the following year we followed it up with a simpler, trifold brochure – printed in color on 14″ paper, with a front panel that bore a strong similarity to the 2014 report.
In 2016, the Kollel practically doubled in size. This was partly funded by a 24-hour online fundraising campaign, and the list of donors grew so long that for the first time we had to limit it to the current year’s honor roll – which still included anyone who had contributed at least $25 over the course of the year. The format of the report borrowed heavily from the materials I’d produced for that years’s annual event. This report was printed at a traditional print house (Springdot) and it featured a full bleed – what a luxury! The centerfold featured a composite photo of the enlarged Kollel “family.”
The next year, we weren’t able to produce an annual report until the final week of the calendar year, when printers were closed for the holidays – so we had to print and bind it in-house once more. No bleeds. The visuals from the most recent fundraising materials didn’t lend themselves well to an annual report, so instead I borrowed a bit from the Kollel’s parasha sheet – including the head shots for the staff lineup, which moved to the inside back cover.
This is a manual I produced for the Chevra Kadisha (literally, “Sacred Society,” a volunteer group which prepares the deceased for burial) of Cincinnati. The previous manual had no illustrations, and some of the Chevra’s procedures had changed when the local funeral home moved into a new facility. I also seem to remember that there were inaccuracies in the previous guidebook, in regard to certain customs and prayers – but I no longer have a copy of the old guidebook, so I can’t verify that. At any rate, the new book was produced with the imprimatur of the late Rabbi Zelig Sharfstein, who headed the local rabbinate, after consultation with Rabbi Elchonon Zohn, a well-known authority and president of the National Association of Chevra Kadisha. 
I was a participating member of the Chevra, and I had attended some of their training sessions with Rabbi Zohn, so I appreciated the need for the revisions, and I had first-hand knowledge of the procedures which needed illustrating.
Looking now at the page with the contents and credits, I see that only took credit for the typesetting. I guess I was feeling modest at the time. I still have my photographs and sketches, on which I based the diagrams, as well as the Photoshop and Illustrator files.
The printed guidebook was produced on legal (8.5 x 11) paper and saddle-stitched; I modified the layout for the PDF posted here.
In 2008, the Kollel’s PR started emphasizing its role as a community builder. To illustrate that point, I was asked to create a group photo which would include the staff, all the alumni who had stayed in Cincinnati, and their families. One Sunday, almost everyone gathered for a photo shoot in the dining room of Cincinnati Hebrew Day School, which we had festooned with blue plastic table covers. Dr. Nachum Klafter took the actual photo. A few days later, I photographed the handful of people who hadn’t been able to make the weekend shoot. I put everyone together in Photoshop, and superimposed the group on a photograph of Old Westbury Gardens – the only photo I could find which matched the scale and perspective of the group photo!
Kollel staff and local alumni, with families – September, 2008
photo shoot, September 2008
Printed on photo paper and framed, the result looked a lot better than it would seem if you had only viewed the photo on a computer monitor. On screen, you can definitely tell which people were added later, and artifacts remain from the “blue screen.” In hindsight, we should have made sure the group shoot was lit up better. We were also running up against the limitations of digital camera resolutions at that time.
the ‘studio” in 2010
the magazine cover
Two years later, I was asked to orchestrate another group photo, this time for a magazine cover. We did the shoot in a nearby, vacant house, where we could set up our tripod, the “blue screen,” and the lighting, and leave them, undisturbed, for the week or so it would take for everyone to file through and have their pictures taken. This helped to make sure that the lighting and perspective would be consistent across all of the photos. All together, there were 65 photographs! Because they were all shot from the same perspective, they didn’t look right when arranged horizontally (as I’d done in 2008). I ended up stacking everyone on top of each other, and I chose a stock photo for the background which would make it seem as though the photo had been taken from a distance – which would jive with the perspectives of the individual shots.
Kollel staff and local alumni, November 2010
the photographer in his studio, 2016
In 2016, after the Kollel expanded its staff, we did a third group photo, which we used as the centerfold of that year’s annual report. This time we set up shop in the Kollel’s Annex Library. Again I took lots of smaller photos and combined them, but this time we only took pictures of staff members and their families, so there were only 32 photos to work with. Instead of looking for an appropriate photo to use as the “setting,” I incorporated the group photo into the backdrop of the annual report – a photoshopped picture of the vintage Formica in my mother’s bathroom! The photograph below is the result, as it appeared in the centerfold.
Kollel staff and families (most of them, anyway), November 2016
Designing the look and feel of an annual event’s materials can be a lot of fun – especially if the event itself looks to be a fun one. Here are several I did for the Cincinnati Community Kollel.
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The Mayerson JCC has a themed art show in its sukkah every year, and all of the local Jewish Federation agencies are invited to participate. From 2013 to 2017, I designed the Kollel’s entries. Here are four of them, along with some photos of the art show.
Inside our new sukkah. (Click to enlarge.)
A quick primer: Two weeks after Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, comes the festival of Sukkos (the Biblical festival of Tabernacles; some pronounce it “Sukkot” – Wikipedia link). It’s a week-long holiday on which observant Jews eat, sleep, and generally spend time in sukkahs (Wikipedia link), little huts with roofs made of plant material. Our cousin Robert Avrech recently posted a collection of photos of sukkahs new and old, from different parts of the world.
About ten years ago, our family spent its first Sukkos at home. That meant either buying a prefab sukkah or building one from scratch. The problem was that we had nowhere to put it when it wasn’t being used. Our garage is small, and we don’t own a shed. Many prefab models, and most DIY sukkahs, are made of between seven and nine framed panels, each measuring four feet wide, seven or eight feet tall, and from one to over three inches thick! There are other options, generally consisting of fabric stretched over wood or metal frames; they take up very little space after they’re disassembled, but (a) many of them have walls which sway in the wind, which may or may not be “up to code” for a sukkah, and (b) I’d like to avoid using metal, since there’s more than one rabbinic authority who requires that the roof not be supported, even indirectly, with metal. (It turns out that this last consideration may be more complicated than that, but I only recently found that out.) There was also the question of how much we could afford to spend.
I ended up designing a sukkah with a notched wooden frame and walls made of white Sequentia (fiberglass-reinforced plastic). Everything was held together with vinyl cable ties. It was a really nice sukkah to look at and sit in, the materials were fairly rainproof, it was very compact when disassembled, and (on paper, at least) it looked to be pretty sturdy. But it was only stable once it was completely assembled, so it was a dog to put up and take down – the first time we erected it, it took no less than six people to hold the parts in place while I ran around, fastening the pieces together!
Last year that sukkah blew down in a storm. It had withstood much worse, but I guess some of the wood had weakened with age and exposure. I’d been daydreaming about a redesign for a while, and now opportunity was knocking.
The new sukkah is made of decking lumber, corrugated plastic boards, and expanded PVC. (See list of materials below.) I could have used HDPE, the material plastic cutting boards are made of, but it’s twice as heavy and twice the price. The biggest improvements over “Sukkah 1.0” are that the corner posts are free-standing and self-supporting, and the panels are stiff enough that they don’t flop over before I have a chance to secure them in place. Not counting the time it takes to drag all of the pieces out of the garage, around the house, and onto the front yard, I think I could have this sukkah completely assembled in less than fifteen minutes!
One downside of the new sukkah is that the corner posts aren’t made of plant-based material. I didn’t have time to both fabricate them from plywood and weatherproof them.
Here’s a photo of two corner posts, cut from expanded PVC board. One is disassembled and the other is complete and standing. Each completed corner post weighs about 32 pounds. Designing these was the hardest part of the project. My oldest child reminds me that, at one point, I had to put aside my pencil and the Legos and take a nap!
(Click to enlarge.)
It would have taken me forever to cut these out with a jigsaw, but Hive13, a local hackerspace, let me bring down the materials to be cut on their CNC router (explanation here). They were also nice enough to show the kids and me around. What a cool place. (Thanks, Coy!)
Each of the sukkah’s sides has crossbeams and a track, which run through holes in the corner posts. Notches in these cross-members allow them to drop onto (or fit under) the corner posts; the notches also keep the cross-members from sliding out, and they make it easy to space the corner posts correctly. Two crossbeams run along the inside of each wall, and one runs on the outside. In the picture below, the tracks and inner crossbeams are in place.
(Click to enlarge)
The crossbeams are made of 6″ wood decking planks (pressure-treated), ripped in half lengthwise. The tracks are made of composite decking planks, also ripped lengthwise; the planks come pre-grooved on their undersides, which saves me the trouble of having to cut grooves myself.
After the panels and the outer crossbeams are up, here’s what the sukkah looks like:
(Click to enlarge)
Note the cable ties in the panels, and the ends of the roof supports sticking out. More on those later.
The side of the sukkah with the entrance has only one plastic panel. There’s a curtain hung across the doorway, which we can tie up to one side if we want fresh air. I cut holes into a piece of wood to accommodate the crossbeams:
(Click to enlarge.)
The top beam passes through, while the lower two are notched. (The holes are offset to accommodate this.) I could have used expanded PVC for this part, too, but I didn’t have any more. The lower crossbeam is made of a reclaimed piece of our old sukkah, and it has lots of holes drilled through it; I repurposed one hole to attach a piece of yarn, with which to tie back the curtain over the entrance.
(Click to enlarge.)
There are four notched beams (wood decking planks, again ripped lengthwise) running across the top of the sukkah. Well, near the top – they rest on top of the crossbeams, with their ends sticking out through holes in the panels, about a foot below the tops of the panels. These hold up the roof, which is a bamboo mat. (I think the protection of the panels prevents the wind from lifting up the bamboo mat and blowing it away, but I can’t say I’ve tested that theory. I do put some scrap wood on top of the corners of the mat, as ballast.) Here’s a view from inside the sukkah, before the mat was rolled out, in which you can see both the beams and the curtain:
(Click to enlarge.)
The beams themselves are spaced with more pieces of wood decking, ripped and notched.
After we put the sukkah together, we realized that the holes in the corner posts are also useful for routing electrical cords.
(Click to enlarge.)
The lower crossbeam facing the house (there are no plastic panels on that side, since the house provides a brick wall) was also doubly useful – we kept unused folding chairs in the space between the beam and the house.
We reused our old system for weather-proofing the electrical connections and a timer for the overhead lights, an inverted plastic container hung from a crossbeam.
(Click to enlarge.)
At some point we noticed that the panels, which are a bit flexible, were sagging and/or flapping in the wind. We ended up drilling holes in them and lashing them to the crossbeams at three points (the upper corners and center bottom) with cable ties. If at we ever have to replace any panels, I may splurge and get quarter-inch expanded PVC, which I believe is stiffer.
After the holiday, it was a cinch to take the sukkah down, and the pieces fit into the storage space we’d set aside for our old sukkah, near the ceiling in the garage – with room to spare for the boxes of lights and decorations!
(Click to enlarge.)
Those are the old Sequentia panels you see, still hanging on the garage wall. It’s amazing how little space they took up!
Acknowledgements
- G-d, of course. (I wouldn’t be building a sukkah if I weren’t religious, would I?)
- My wife, who tried very hard (and very well, mostly) to act as if she were completely confidant that I’d be able to get the sukkah up before the start of the holiday.
- The good people at Hive13, Coy especially.
- My kids, who helped a lot with construction and decoration.
- The sales rep at Curbell Plastics, who first suggested using expanded PVC instead of HDPE.
Materials
- Expanded PVC – 4′ x 8′, 3/4″ thick, two sheets. (75 pounds apiece!) Purchased from Piedmont Plastics, where both the sales rep and the in-stock inventory were excellent.
- Corrugated plastic – 4′ x 8′, 1/4″ thick, six sheets. Also purchased from Piedmont Plastics.
- Wood and composite decking, in 8′, 12′, and 16′ lengths. Purchased from the local big-box hardware store. Note that the beams and tracks must be longer than the sides, so they’ll extend through/past the corner posts. For example, the beams for the 12′, three-panel sides had to be cut from 16′ stock. (Also note that decking lumber longer than 16′ may be impossible to find, which will make it hard to expand the sukkah beyond 12′ in any direction. I do have a plan, in my mind, for making mid-wall supports similar to the corner posts, which would support end-to-end assemblies of crossbeams and panels.)
- Vinyl cable ties, 11″. Purchased from the local big-box hardware store.
- Lined curtain, 4′ panel with loops for large curtain rod. Purchased many years ago from a long-forgotten discount store.
Tools, etc.
- Table saw, with thin-kerf blade and dado
- Jig saw (handheld)
- Drill and bits (1/4″ and 3/8″)
- CNC router (3/16″ bit, IIRC)
- I drew a rough pattern for the corner braces in pencil on graph paper. Then I laid it out in Adobe InDesign and Illustrator and exported the file as DXF (AutoCAD), which was imported into whatever CNC router software Coy was using.